WATCH: Sticking to Principles

For a while now, we’ve been intrigued as to where a lot of fashion films and shows get their rather esoteric electro music, which is often so industrial bleak you wonder if designers aren’t serious modern misanthropes.

A decent site where you’ll find both the rarified and the borderline pretentious in more or less equal measure is Nowness, a name that in itself implies that it is searching for a definition of what being in the now means. We like that they just put something out there and ask you to love or not love it, unlike here at PFC, where you’d better fucking well love everything we slap up there, unless we tell you otherwise.

We’re also purists when it comes to film: The company’s slogan is “everything has a story,” so anything without one is suspect, especially if it’s film. Any time we see something abstract, or worse “experimental,” that doesn’t adhere to the basic principles of narrative, we’re likely to call it crap faster than we would a summer tentpole studio blockbuster.

Music videos are generally exempt from our fascistic principles; they can invoke artistic license to be impressionistic because the image should be almost always is subservient to the soundtrack. Sigur Rós is a notable exception, but that’s because they are so ethereal it would be hard to come up with images that are more subtle than the music. And we certainly allow that other delightful Scandi multimedia freakshow iamwhoiamwhoamilicense to do whatever they want; that said, if one stops trying to find meaning in their pieces, they start making perfect sense. (Killough will be doing a feature on them when their next video is released on YouTube.)

At first we were inclined to dump Julien Carot‘s film for the French electro duo Principlesof Geometry on the heap of borderline pretentious, but then we rescued it and took it to the rarified section instead—it’s pretty good, beautifully crafted, and even makes narrative sense, if you think of it as a piece from iamwhoiamwhoami and don;t reduce it from its…

Uh oh. We’re tipping into pretension ourselves, over analyzing this like a fifth date with an exciting new lover. Without further ado, we’ll let you be the judge (more about the piece at Nowness):

TRICK OR TWEET

Just learned the hard, deeply embarrassing way that wiggling your fingers in a down-came-the-rain motion from Eensie Weensie Spider is NOT improvised international sign language for "Is it still raining outside?"

So hard for me as an American in Vietnam to resist beginning every conversation with, "Terribly sorry for what we did. It was horrific, a tragic mistake. So, I'll start with the Mién hài sàn, then as a main course..."

Thai driver: "You both have beautiful color eyes. But can you see clearly with them like we do? If I show you to my nephew he think you are vampires from Twilight movie." It's not racism if you're compared to undead emo adolescents with potentially murky vision.

Let's face it, Western food is cowardly with flavors and boring, even at its most "gourmet" pretentious. Imagine if a Thai or Vietnamese tire company gave out coveted, make-or-break stars. Would any restaurant west of the Khyber Pass get one? #culturalimperialism